Red Pottage eBook

“I am going away for a time, but I shall come
back,” she said to the cobbler’s wife
on the same landing.

“No one comes back as once goes,” said
the woman, without raising her eyes from the cheap
blouse which she was finishing, which kept so well
the grim secret of how it came into being that no one
was afraid of buying it.

“I am keeping on the room.”

The woman smiled incredulously, giving one sharp glance
at the bundle. She had seen many flittings.
She should buy the kettle when Rachel’s “sticks”
were sold by the landlord in default of the rent.

“Well, you was a good neighbor,” she said.
“There’s a-many as ’ull miss you.
Good-bye, and good luck to ye. I sha’n’t
say as you’ve left.”

“I shall come back,” said Rachel, hoarsely,
and she slipped down-stairs like a thief. She
felt like a thief. For she was rich. The
man who had led her father into the speculations which
had ruined him had died childless, and had bequeathed
to her a colossal fortune.

CHAPTER VII

Cure the drunkard, heal
the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize
the Pawnee, but what
lessons can be devised for the debauchee of
sentiment?—­EMERSON.

A fortnight had passed since the drawing of lots,
and Lady Newhaven remained in ignorance as to which
of the two men had received his death-warrant.
Few have found suspense easy to bear; but for the
self-centred an intolerable element is added to it,
which unselfish natures escape. From her early
youth Lady Newhaven had been in the habit of viewing
life in picturesque tableaux vivants of which
she invariably formed the central figure. At
her confirmation the Bishop, the white-robed clergy,
and the other candidates had served but as a nebulous
background against which her own white-clad, kneeling
figure, bowed in reverent devotion, stood out in high
relief.

When she married Lord Newhaven he took so slight a
part, though a necessary one, in the wedding groups
that their completeness had never been marred by misgivings
as to his exact position in them. When, six years
later, after one or two mild flirtations which only
served as a stimulus to her love of dress—­when
at last she met, as she would have expressed it, “the
one love of her life,” her first fluctuations
and final deviation from the path of honor were the
result of new arrangements round the same centre.

The first groups in which Hugh took part had been
prodigies of virtue. The young mother with the
Madonna face—­Lady Newhaven firmly believed
that her face, with the crimped fringe drawn down to
the eyebrows, resembled that of a Madonna—­with
her children round her, Lord Newhaven as usual somewhat
out of focus in the background; and Hugh, young, handsome,
devoted, heartbroken, and ennobled for life by the
contemplation of such impregnable virtue.

“You accuse me of coldness,” she had imagined
herself saying in a later scene, when the children
and the husband would have made too much of a crowd,
and were consequently omitted. “I wish to
Heaven I were as cold as I appear.”